Of Interest

Let’s spend three days discussing the College’s new fundraising campaign: Teach It Forward: The Campaign for Williams. The main webpage is here. Today is Day 2.

Williams will seek $150 million in endowment support for financial aid in the campaign—to ensure affordability for low- and middle-income students, as well for international students, and therein sustain the socioeconomic diversity of the student body. Financial aid is the campaign’s single largest fundraising priority.

1) This is good to see, but I have been burned before in (naively?) believing that international enrollment is a high priority for Falk/Williams. The single biggest decision that Williams faces is: How many international students to enroll? I think that, immediately, Williams should go to 15% and then quickly to 20%, with a probably long-term goal of 50%.

2) Just what does it mean to raise $150 million for financial aid? Is there really some financial aid lock-box which contains dollars that can only be used for financial aid? I have my doubts. Money is fungible. And the College has a history of using money given for financial aid (at least for international students) for other purposes. I would be happier to see a more concrete pledge: Williams will offer financial aid packages at least as generous as those offered by Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford. See this recent comment:

[T]he difference between aid provided by Williams and its top liberal arts college peers and that provided by the top universities is hard to overcome.

My child is a high school senior and realistic applicant to the top schools. Based on our income, Williams expects we can contribute roughly $38,000 toward college annually. We cannot. Harvard and Yale expect us to contribute slightly less than $20,000 per year – a stretch, but one we can make. I wish the difference in cost between Williams and Yale weren’t roughly $80,000 over the course of an undergraduate degree.

Williams should match the financial aid offered to any admitted student who is also admitted by Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford. High school seniors might very well choose HYPS over Williams, but they shouldn’t do so because of financial aid.

(1) Williams cannot in good conscience, and should not, match the financial aid of any student admitted to a certain subset of schools. That is simply merit-based aid, and that is fundamentally inconsistent with everything else in Williams’ admissions process. Now, if you want to say Williams should increase aid, generally, that’s fine — and hopefully this fund will allow for that. But Williams is already among the half-dozen or so most generous schools in the country in terms of need-based aid, so there isn’t a ton of room to move up. And to the extent Williams wants to “match” aid for HYPS, that’s going to have a negligible impact, if any, on the composition of the frosh class, since very, very few students each year choose Williams, regardless of finances, over those schools, unless you want to start giving out merit scholarships, which Williams should not be doing. So making this change will be determinative for maybe, what, 5-10 students a year, at most? Probably less. Seems like a waste of resources when those 5-10 slots will be filled by students who are also brilliant and talented and eager to attend Williams.

2) It’s not like the current student body is suffering, in all events — by all accounts despite a larger student body (gradually increased over time to the current 550 in a class) the academic credentials of the student body are the strongest they’ve ever been, with the bonus that the student body is also by FAR the most diverse it has ever been. Williams has to turn away from more truly brilliant and talented students than it can admit — in fact given all the massive investment in campus infrastructure, I think Williams should aim eventually to expand to around 575, maybe even 600 tops, per class. And there is also the issue of fit — I would not WANT to be surrounded by the type of kids Harvard often enrolls — hyper-competitive, prestige-focused, kids who started working at age nine to be the best mathematician/scientist/debater etc. in their cohort. This is an overgeneralization of course, but I like that Williams has loads of kids who are all-around, well-rounded, still brilliant, but don’t necessarily fit into the top-tier Ivy “best in the world at [x]” framework. I’d rather see Williams marginal financial aid dollars, as they are, given to students who are truly disadvantaged and have overcome that in some way — namely, by, say, doubling the number of Tyng scholars in each class.

3) 50 percent international is ridiculous. That would crowd out alumni kids, athletes, artists, domestic minority students, domestic first-generation students, domestic geographic diversity, veterans, plus all sorts of other students that Williams has worked hard to attract. Fundamentally, it would turn Williams into a finishing school for primarily students from East Asian countries, rather than, you know, an American college with alumni having a disproportionate impact here in the U.S. Could Williams move up from the current 8 percent to something like 12 percent? Sure. And as more and more internationals apply, some upwards creep is probably inevitable. But 20 percent? Unless they materially increase the size of the student body, ain’t gonna happen. Let alone 50.

3) I agree on one point: it’s odd that SO much detail was provided for all the other areas of the campaign, while the HUGE amount allotted to financial aid was left so nebulous and vague. I wonder if this will be fleshed out a bit over time?